Amazon EC2 presents a true virtual computing environment, allowing you to use web service interfaces to launch instances with a variety of operating systems, load them with your custom application environment, manage your network’s access permissions, and run your image using as many or few systems as you desire.

Customers requiring very high, low latency, random I/O access to their data can benefit from High I/O instances. High I/O instances are an Amazon EC2 instance type that can provide customers with random I/O rates over 3 Million IOPS. High I/O I3 instances are backed by Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) based SSDs, and are ideally suited for customers running very high performance NoSQL databases, transactional systems, and Elastic Search workloads. High I/O instances also offers sequential disk throughput up to 16 GB/s, which is ideal for analytics workloads.

Customers requiring very high storage density per instance, and high sequential I/O for data-intensive applications like Massively Parallel Processing (MPP) data warehouse, MapReduce and Hadoop distributed computing, and log and data processing can benefit from Dense Storage instances. Dense Storage instances are an Amazon EC2 instance type that can provide customers with sequential I/O throughout of up to 3.9 GB/s and provide customers with up to 48 TB of instance storage across 24 hard disk drives. See Amazon EC2 Instance Types to find out more about Dense Storage instances.

Amazon EBS provides persistent, highly available, consistent, low-latency block storage volumes for use with Amazon EC2 instances. Each Amazon EBS volume is automatically replicated within its Availability Zone to protect you from component failure, offering high availability and durability. It is designed for application managers who need to tune workloads for capacity, performance and cost.

Amazon EFS provides simple, scalable, persistent, fully managed cloud file storage for shared access. Designed for high availability and durability across multiple Availability Zones it delivers a file system interface with standard file system access semantics, grows and shrinks capacity automatically, and provides application managers with high throughput and consistently low latencies at petabyte scale.

You will be charged at the end of each month for your EC2 resources actually consumed.

As an example, assume you launch 20 instances of the Small type costing $0.085 per hour at some point in time. The instances will begin booting immediately, but they won’t necessarily all start at the same moment. Each instance will store its actual launch time. Thereafter, each instance will charge for its hours (at $.085/hour) of execution at the beginning of each hour relative to the time it launched. Each instance will run until one of the following occurs: you terminate the instance with the TerminateInstances API call (or an equivalent tool), the instance shuts itself down (e.g. UNIX “shutdown” command), or the host terminates due to software or hardware failure. Partial instance hours consumed are billed as full hours.

Amazon EC2 provides the ability to place instances in multiple locations. Amazon EC2 locations are composed of Regions and Availability Zones. Availability Zones are distinct locations that are engineered to be insulated from failures in other Availability Zones and provide inexpensive, low latency network connectivity to other Availability Zones in the same Region. By launching instances in separate Availability Zones, you can protect your applications from failure of a single location. Regions consist of one or more Availability Zones, are geographically dispersed, and will be in separate geographic areas or countries. The Amazon EC2 Service Level Agreement commitment is 99.95% availability for each Amazon EC2 Region. Please refer to Regional Products and Services for more details of our product and service availability by region.

Elastic IP addresses are static IP addresses designed for dynamic cloud computing. An Elastic IP address is associated with your account not a particular instance, and you control that address until you choose to explicitly release it. Unlike traditional static IP addresses, however, Elastic IP addresses allow you to mask instance or Availability Zone failures by programmatically remapping your public IP addresses to any instance in your account. Rather than waiting on a data technician to reconfigure or replace your host, or waiting for DNS to propagate to all of your customers, Amazon EC2 enables you to engineer around problems with your instance or software by quickly remapping your Elastic IP address to a replacement instance. In addition, you can optionally configure the reverse DNS record of any of your Elastic IP addresses by filling out this form.

Auto Scaling allows you to automatically scale your Amazon EC2 capacity up or down according to conditions you define. With Auto Scaling, you can ensure that the number of Amazon EC2 instances you’re using scales up seamlessly during demand spikes to maintain performance, and scales down automatically during demand lulls to minimize costs. Auto Scaling is particularly well suited for applications that experience hourly, daily, or weekly variability in usage. Auto Scaling is enabled by Amazon CloudWatch and available at no additional charge beyond Amazon CloudWatch fees. See Auto Scaling for more details.

Customers with complex computational workloads such as tightly coupled parallel processes, or with applications sensitive to network performance, can achieve the same high compute and network performance provided by custom-built infrastructure while benefiting from the elasticity, flexibility and cost advantages of Amazon EC2. Cluster Compute, Cluster GPU, and High Memory Cluster instances have been specifically engineered to provide high-performance network capability and can be programmatically launched into clusters – allowing applications to get the low-latency network performance required for tightly coupled, node-to-node communication. Cluster instances also provide significantly increased throughput making them well suited for customer applications that need to perform network-intensive operations. Learn more about how Amazon EC2 and other AWS services can be used for HPC Applications.

Enhanced Networking enables you to get significantly higher packet per second (PPS) performance, lower network jitter and lower latencies. This feature uses a new network virtualization stack that provides higher I/O performance and lower CPU utilization compared to traditional implementations. In order to take advantage of Enhanced Networking, you should launch an HVM AMI in VPC, and install the appropriate driver. For instructions on how to enable Enhanced Networking on EC2 instances, see the Enhanced Networking on Linux and Enhanced Networking on Windows tutorials. For availability of this feature by instance, or to learn more, visit the Enhanced Networking FAQ section.

Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) are preconfigured with an ever-growing list of operating systems. We work with our partners and community to provide you with the most choice possible. You are also empowered to use our bundling tools to upload your own operating systems. The operating systems currently available to use with your Amazon EC2 instances include:

AWS Marketplace features a wide selection of commercial and free software from well-known vendors, designed to run on your EC2 instances. A sample of products are below. To see the full selection, visit AWS Marketplace.